Imagine you’re watching an artist at work. Just taking in the individual brushstrokes of their painting, you see beautiful details but you miss the whole picture. You need to take some steps back to gain a full perspective — to truly grasp what the artist is saying.

The same can be applied to better understanding your search performance. You need to step back to appreciate the complete picture, what the data is saying as a whole. The Data team and I are working on a new feature for Empathy Playboard to help: Custom search performance reports. This will allow you to blend data from Playboard Analytics and your analytics tool, giving you all the information you need in a single report. 

Revealing data with human intellect

1 - Select report templates you like.
Reports diving into different topics will be available in Playboard. Just choose one or two, or all of them!

2 - Share the data you want analysed.
Tell us which additional analytics tools you use, such as Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics, etc. We will need data from there to build your complete picture. We won’t store any information, simply accessing with read-only permission for creating your report.

3 - Choose when you want it.
Set how often you want to receive reports: daily, weekly, monthly, etc.

4 - Custom report comes to you.
Let the Data team work our magic to generate an intriguing, beautiful and lovable report that brings fresh insights to your inbox.

Putting custom reports to work for you

Imagine the number of queries in your search has recently dropped. Nothing has changed in your search setup. Yet the data within Playboard doesn’t seem to explain this trend. So you go to your analytics tool and as you suspected, the data here has the same shape as in Playboard. But this tool also collects more of your site information, and you discover that not only have queries dropped, but sessions using search and site visits have decreased as well. Finally after diving deeper into the data, you identify some issues with organic traffic to your site are at the root of the problem.

While this bigger-picture information is outside the scope of search data, it’s the key. You need the whole context around your site to optimise search performance. 

The Data team and I know it’s tricky and time-consuming to manage and interpret data from multiple sources. Fortunately, we are here to make your life easier, breaking these data silos and blending your analytics data with Playboard stats into a single report. Ultimately, saving your time for what matters: getting the insights you need to make the most of your search.

Ready to paint your bigger picture? Stay tuned for this feature in your Playboard soon!